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Friday, September 9, 2011

On the Front Lines: An Interview With Writer Douglas Century (Part 2)

In part two of ‘On the
Front Lines: An Interview With Writer Douglas Century’ (Click here to read part
one), Douglas discusses the validity of the 52 Hand Blocks as a fighting system.

Scott “Tre” Wilson:
How effective, in your opinion, is the 52 Hand Blocks as a fighting
system? Can it be it employed in a real
fight, or is it just mythology?

Douglas Century: Good question. More than once I’ve been accused of making
the whole thing up. “Hey, that 52 Blocks
thing— it’s an urban myth.” When I first
learned about it, when I first saw it, I was around K and another brother named
Life from Crown Heights. There was a
slightly older dude, in the book (Street
Kingdom: Five Years Inside the Franklin Avenue Posse) I called him
Razor. His real name is Duffy. He was a beast at this shit! Within their own worlds—in their own
neighborhoods—these were famous dudes, man.
The 52 was famous in Brooklyn. So
when I was hanging out there, I started to write about it. I first wrote about it in the book. Then I did
this article just on 52 Blocks in Details
magazine. Funny thing—I just assumed
that a lot of folks already knew about it.
I mean, the cats in the Wu-Tang Clan referenced it in their lyrics. Lines like, “52 cops can’t withstand the 52
blocks.” So what’s up—now you think it’s
just an urban myth?

Those guys that really mastered it are a little bit older
than K. His brother Rique who I met,
died really tragically. He had done a
ten-year bid and come out from Clinton/Danemmora. He’d been hit with night sticks by
correction officers and suffered brain injuries. Before he went away, I heard about how he was
really wicked with the 52’s. That was
this crew of guys who were like a few years older than K. They were from Washington Avenue in Crown
Heights, known as the Ave-Ave Crew.

Scott “Tre” Wilson:
So what do you think happened? Why did
the 52 Blocks disappear?

Douglas Century: What
basically changed is that when young guys started to pick up guns, the 52 Hand
Blocks started to become a dying art. If
you talk to guys from New York City back when—I know more about the guys from
Brooklyn, but it’s true of all the boroughs—there would be 52 Blocks fights on
the regular. Obviously, I wasn’t in
prison to see it, but I’ve heard enough people talk about guys being locked up
and multiple attackers coming at them.

The main thing about 52 is that it’s deceptive movement. It’s a way of basically blocking and
redirecting multiple attackers. And it
was a generational thing, passed down from older brother to younger brothers,
with actual contact—not light sparring.
So it’s not like you can go to some dojo and learn this shit. And it takes years and years to really
master. Part of it is you have to have
very powerful forearms. You do a lot of
blocking with your forearms and shoulders.
That’s where those intense bar workouts that you see Giant and the
Bartendaz doing—I’ve heard guys inside call it “gettin’ drunk”—because you
develop such powerful forearms for blocking.

One way to describe it would be to say it’s a peek-a-boo
style of boxing with a lot of flashy, rhythmic, deceptive movement. In its heyday— let’s say in the’ 70s and
‘80s—dudes will tell you that it was very effective in the real world. When I first wrote about it, I started to get
involved with these mixed-martial arts forums and all these guys who are into
MMA started to question me about it.
Some were genuinely interested in it and some were just skeptical and
mocking.

But it doesn’t make sense to put 52 Blocks in the same
conversation as sport fighting. Street
fighting isn’t designed for the ring or cage.
Nowadays, Big K and his guys have begun to modify 52 Blocks for a gym or
sports setting—they have their group called Constellation that’s training
people in 52—but I think it’s still tough to take any real-world street/prison
system and put it into a cage. For example,
dudes in the hood don’t go down and turtle up and do a Jujitsu thing with their
back on the ground because other guys would stomp them in the face. People talk about how BJJ is the most street
effective system. Well, not if Suge
Knight’s going to drop his size 13 boot on your fucking head. That’s the real world. Guys don’t want to go down on the ground if
they’re fighting in the streets of Flatbush or Crown Heights.

Daniel Marks, who is K’s partner in Constellation, has
really researched this to the point of its African origins. Again this is something that really pisses
certain people off. They don’t want to
hear it. Slaves came to the New World
and brought styles of music, dance and religion from diverse regions in
Africa. So my question to the skeptics
is: Why wouldn’t they also have fighting traditions? Why wouldn’t they bring some aspect of
African fighting systems? Maybe it’s not
a pure system from Senegal or Nigeria or Angola, and people will really knock
you by saying “Well, 52 isn’t African.”

As far as the aesthetics, you can make an analogy to
basketball. Basketball began as a
predominantly white sport, right? For a
long time—funny as this sounds today—it was a very Jewish sport actually. Well, Black people wanted to see a different
style of basketball. They wanted to
bring their own flavor. So the sick
dunks, the crossover dribbles, the no-look passing—that’s really what the NBA
is about nowadays. That’s a
certain aesthetic, right? That’s the same aesthetic you see in 52. There’s only so many ways to curl up your
fists and box. Of course 52 Hand Blocks
is a subset of striking. It’s a style of
boxing, but it’s much slicker than you’d see in conventional prizefighting. You don’t want to just knock a guy out
like Rocky Marciano. You want to fake him
out and backslap him. You’ll want to
feint like you’re going to pull his pant leg and then hit him with a
looping overhead “dead-arm” punch.

Scott “Tre” Wilson: Why do so many people question its real-world
application?

Douglas Century:
The reason people question whether it’s effective in the real world is that
people simply don’t square up and fight like that for hours and hours in the street
any more. The descriptions I would hear
of the 70’s is that dudes would stand on the corner or in the playground for hours
practicing the blocks. That cat Duffy
that I mentioned, who would go to this one park, St. John’s Place, and he would
do his blocks. He’d just do his routine. He would do pull ups, and other guys would
come out. The thing about 52 is there’s
no sparring. You don’t light spar,
you’re hitting guys—full speed, full power.
So they became warriors with this shit, they really got lumped up. You don’t see too many dudes in the real
world standing on a corner fighting for fifteen minutes. Also, New York has changed, and the cops
will lock them up for assault real quick.

Part of it is a code of chivalry too—or whatever you want to
call it. Guys felt an honor in handling
shit with your fists. To be considered a
tough guy back in the ’60s and ‘70s—up until crack hit—you had to have hand
skills. You weren’t a tough guy just
with a gun. But that’s all changed,
man. There are a lot of killers out here
who are 17 years old and really can’t fight toe-to-toe, but as long as they’ve
got a lot of ammunition and their gun doesn’t jam, they can control their
block. They’re tough enough to kill
you. Guys don’t want to fight with their
hands that much anymore.

Prison changed too.
When K was last locked up, he was telling me—back in about 2000—that the
art of 52 had pretty much died out inside.
There are still some cats upstate doing life who know it, but they’re
not going to be seeing the free world again.
When I went up to do that article for Details and they brought K into this room, the correction officers left me and this
photographer alone, locked up in this tiny room with K. This female CO was just outside,
watching. The photographer said (about
K), “If this dude wanted to just take us prisoner and just knock us out, what
the fuck are these correction officers going to do?” (Laughs). They don’t have
guns. K’s a big enough dude—and the
speed he moves with his 52—a bunch of CO’s would have had to swarm him with
nightsticks and all that shit.

The bottom line with it is that it’s very effective, but I
think we should also consider it a lost art.
I wouldn’t call it a dead art, because there are guys like Daniel and K
and Constellation that are still trying to keep it alive. They’ve created a revival, with proper
seminars and training camps all around the country.

Just like you’ll still find old dudes from the South who can
play the authentic blues, right? It
still exists. You’d see these
documentaries about prison down in Louisiana and all these guys singing these
blues songs. Well Black culture changed,
right? Kids who listen to Drake or Lil
Wayne or whoever is hot at the moment in Hip-Hop don’t care about some old
Delta blues. If you went to a blues club
(today) it would probably be 95 percent white people. Black culture changed—52 Blocks wasn’t
valued. As I said, there’s couple of
guys like K, Daniel and Constellation that are trying to keep it alive as an
art. I just think as long as the young
kids aren’t into it, they’re not going to respect it. As much as the old heads would tell them “Yo,
back in the day people fought. You had
to stand your square and trade blows.”
It doesn’t mean much to a 16 year old kid, because that’s not his
reality, right? He’ll only do that on a
Playstation or an Xbox (laughs).

Scott “Tre” Wilson:
You write in Street Kingdom about K
being locked up as a juvenile in Spofford with Mike Tyson and you say that Mike
knows some 52 Hand Blocks.

Douglas Century: Yeah. Mike Tyson knows a little 52. Certain of his early fights – if you go back
to when he was a young undefeated heavyweight, terrorizing the division – you
can perceive elements of 52 in his head movement, some of his blocks and that
stalking style. A lot of the elements of
52 Blocks aren’t legal in prizefighting, so a guy like Mike would have had to
“unlearn” them in order to fight the way that Cus D’Amato and Kevin Rooney were
training him.

Now, here’s a “what if” question that always comes up. If a powerful guy of Tyson’s stature were
doing 52 and had been in MMA and had some elemental takedown defense – if he
knew how to sprawl a bit and not get tied up easily in wrestling holds—how
would he have done? I think he would
have owned that shit. His head movement
and punching power alone was just on another level when he was young. And the tightness of the guard in a 52 stance
would be hard to penetrate. The striking in 52 is unpredictable, it’s coming from
so many different angles, and the sense of rhythm is very sophisticated. But remember back in the days, guys were
trained to fight in prison. K always
called them “Gladiator Schools” when he was a kid— even the juvenile joints
like Spofford in the Bronx. There were
moves and styles named after all these upstate prisons: Comstock, Elmira,
what-have-you. That’s as real as it
gets. This is a style of fighting that
people use to survive in prison. Why
would it not be effective? You think
guys would invent movements that didn’t work?
In prison they are basically trying to survive.

A lot of people don’t realize this, in the earliest
formative years of Hip-Hop there was the style of battle dance called
Up-Rocking, right? Up-Rocking was
basically guys studying their older brothers, usually hardcore gangsters, guys
who’d come home from upstate doing 52 and who were sparring. So if you look at those Up-Rock battles,
they’re dipping down, feinting, and throwing shadow punches, but they aren’t
making contact. They’re just taking 52
where the guys would actually be landing blows, and they removed the contact
from the equation. So the 52 Blocks
really has a powerful connection to the origins of Hip-Hop culture.

About Me

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Scott Wilson, deep thinker and blogger extraordinaire. I'm also a published author and proud father. Last but certainly not least, I'm a single (IE Available), but I'm definitely looking to change that. My life is an ongoing work in progress, and I'm always looking to improve.